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Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Whose tougher than Ray Lewis? Elizabeth Smart!

“Elizabeth Smart is a flat out bad ass” I thought,
looking out over the crowd of women I fit in distressingly well with. Hundreds
of “ladies who lunch”. Invited to a fund raiser for a girls group home.
Elizabeth at the podium being inspirational while telling as little of her
story as possible. Something I admired and understood. She described herself
pre-kidnapping as a “wallflower” and “beyond painfully shy”. For the most extroverted
of us, having the world voyeuristically invested in your abduction, torture and
rape would be ugly.

It’s incredible where you can find bad assness. This benign
looking young woman drenched in it. A girl that frankly, without her kidnapping,
and in her own words would be “just another blonde girl from Utah”. Someone your
eyes would slide by on their way to shinier more interesting targets.

I kept thinking about how I’d see Elizabeth if I didn’t
know her story. How I might tell someone “I met the sweetest kid today”. People
watching at the mall I’d dismiss her as a “wallflower”. Her shoulders are slightly
rounded in and her face a bit flushed, she doesn’t look quite comfortable. She
seems an introverted even frightened girl. Sitting at a table of people, if she
stood out, that’s what she’d stand out for.

When in fact she’s a bad ass. A David kills Goliath kind
of bad ass. An “I eat navy seals and NFL linebackers for breakfast” kind of
badass. She’s a real hero that mostly matters just to women. It’s the way we
define tough in this country that puts Elizabeth Smart on the speaking circuit
for women’s and children’s issues. While someone like Ray Lewis, an ex NFL
something or other, will be sought out by corporations, politicians, government
agencies, and likely even some women’s and children’s organizations. He'll command much larger fees than Elizabeth’s. He’ll be a highly sought out
motivational speaker because he played football. Because he was good at football.
Football (sigh).

Would he have cried hysterically and begged for his
mother if someone (bigger, stronger, and meaner than him) woke him up in the
middle of the night with a knife to his neck, drug him to a remote mountain
top, chained him like a dog and repeatedly raped him. Keeping him, in
Elizabeth’s words “as an object. Not even a pet”. There for him to “do whatever
he wanted with. To be a permanent audience when he wanted to talk” and a
physical object when he didn’t.

The kind of tough men we glorify in sports and
television, men like Ray Lewis who may have killed a man in real life and can
beat them on a football field. And Jax Teller from the TV show Sons of Anarchy.
Jax whose biker gang character runs hookers and films porn. Jax who beat up his
ex-girlfriend in order to gain custody of his son. Men who carry guns and get
in fights and pick fights on sports fields. We think they’re tough.

Those men have nothing on Elizabeth Smart. Who literally
walked through the valley of death and came out a gracious, loving, and
optimistic human being trying to make the world a better place. Elizabeth Smart
who understands that “everyone has a story and a struggle but everyone’s
struggle is different”. Whose hope for the abused and neglected girls she’s
championing is that they “understand nothing in their past can cheat them of
their value as human beings”.

In this video of Ray Lewis, giving a motivational speech
for a group of young athletes at Stanford University, he asks “If tomorrow
wasn’t’ promised what would you give for today?”

It’s a good question. And one
that Elizabeth Smart can answer. At 14 years old, that little girl spent every
day thinking tomorrow might not come. But Ray Lewis faced down
big mean football players while making millions of dollars to do it. He's a bad ass.

I’m amusing myself with the pictures in my head of
Elizabeth Smart walking into that locker room in Stanford, asking the question
“If tomorrow wasn’t promised what would you give for today”. The looks on the boy's
faces that say “who the hell is this? Joe… who IS this? Ummmm coach the social
work departments speaker got lost”.

1 comment:

Ray Lewis is a punk. I like football, now. But really, running around a football field bashing into other men, claiming your he-man strength is not strong. Ray Lewis was indicted for murder. Whether or not he was convicted, he has a stain which will never go away. Elizabeth Smart, Jaycee Dugard, Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, Georgina "Gina" DeJesus (and these are just women who's names have been in the news) these women have suffered unimaginable torture, degrading humiliation, years of separation from life as they knew it from everyone and every thing they loved, through no fault of there own without cause or reason for the total amusement and enjoyment of MEN who decided it was their right and allowance to take CHILDREN - girls -from loving, caring homes and place them into situations they could never have imagined, and survived. There are times when I wonder how I allowed myself to go down a path which caused me grief. I still stand. However to think that these women have survived worse than anything Ray Lewis would or could have ever imagined. To think Ray Lewis can say, hey I ran some guy over a bunch of guys on a football field, and they paid me too is crap. He is not tough. He might be a nice guy, he might be a christian. But those girls have something special and THEY are the ones who will show us that beyond it all, we can stand tall and we can live and survive. Pray we never have to know the depth of pain they did, but pray they can find a way to help us to know inner strength.